Out of the Silence

by Robert Foster

  Many of these forms of settler remembrance may perhaps inevitably be conservative, but other forms of historical consciousness might find voice in local and personal connections. Mike Brown is a South Australian author and activist, brother of the former state Premier Dean Brown. In 2002, the same year that saw the publication of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Brown published a work directed towards reconciliation, No Longer Down Under: Australians Creating Change. In this book he describes leafing through a local history of the Flinders Ranges and discovering a personal link to the region’s frontier past. The Brown family’s ancestors were pioneer settlers who had arrived in the colony in 1841. Over the years the family prospered, and the descendents of those pioneers are known in farming, business and politics. As it transpired, Mike’s great-great uncle, James Brown, was the 17 year-old youth who had been killed by Aboriginal people on his brothers’ sheep station near Mount Arden in the spring of 1852. Mike Brown spoke with local historians who gave him more details about the event and pointed out that there were Aboriginal graves in the area associated with an act of retribution that had taken place for James’ death. ‘No-one’, he would later write, ‘would recognise it as a war cemetery. Yet that’s what it was.’3 Researching the family records, Mike Brown uncovered the memoir of James’ older brother Thomas Brown, which recorded the events of the day in 1852 on which he and a party of two dozen settlers, accompanied by a mounted constable, took the law into their own hands in retaliation for James’ death. ‘What the finish was’ on that day, he wrote, ‘needs no telling’; ‘I can only say that in this case we carried out God’s decree’, and that following their ‘severe but necessary lesson’ of that day, ‘there was no more trouble with the blacks’. He also wrote that with the presence of the mounted constable, ‘in all we did there was no concealment or action outside the law’.4

  If Thomas Brown’s memoir reveals something of the lived culture of the violent frontier, Mike Brown’s efforts to uncover it foregrounds some of the unresolved questions that face the descendents of pioneers.5 As Deborah Bird Rose points out, there is ‘no shortage of triumphal narratives of nation-building’, but the task facing non-Aboriginal Australian communities is to ‘seek out spaces where we reveal glimpses of the knowledge of how we are implicated in the disasters of our histories, our homes and our own lives’.6

  Proclamation Day in the present

  An event officially commemorating the European settlement of South Australia was held for the first time on 28 December 1857 at the coastal suburb of Glenelg where, just 21 years earlier, Governor John Hindmarsh had read the Proclamation that symbolically marked Britain’s claim to the new colony. The commemorative event, attended by Governor MacDonnell in the year that South Australia achieved Responsible Government, featured a reading of the Proclamation. Most of the document dealt with the question of Aboriginal people as subjects of the Crown protected from ‘acts of violence and injustice’, yet when this first Proclamation ceremony was instituted in 1857, ‘acts of violence and injustice’ were daily being played out on the western and northern frontiers of the colony. Over time ‘Proclamation Day’, as it came to be known, became the formal commemoration of South Australia’s foundation, and by the turn of the century it had become a major celebratory event.

  The commemoration of Proclamation Day endures today. On 28 December 2007, we attended the annual Proclamation Day ceremony at Glenelg. It was a warm morning, but there was plenty of shade from the many gum trees which had been ceremonially planted over the decades. An honour-guard of men dressed in the uniforms of colonial police, all armed with muskets, took their place near the official podium beneath the gum tree as the official guests arrived. As the crowd awaited the Governor, a pair of modern-day mounted police rode forward to shield a small group of Aboriginal protesters who waited on the footpath opposite the entrance gate. Once all the dignitaries had taken their places, the event began, as it had begun for generations, with the reading of the Proclamation.

  As the Chief Executive Officer of the Holdfast Council read the passage of the Proclamation which promised ‘to punish with exemplary severity all acts of violence and injustice … against the natives’, an Aboriginal protester called out: ‘what justice?’ The protesters carried placards calling for a treaty, and stood before a banner that read: ‘Aborigines were wrongfully deprived of their just dues. We must, as far as we can, right those wrongs.’ These were the very words spoken by Don Dunstan in parliament in 1966 to underscore what he believed was the State’s moral responsibility to address the issue of Aboriginal land rights. Forty one years later they were the words protesters chose to employ to press home their calls for Native title and reconciliation. As Premier, Don Dunstan appointed Sir Doug Nicholls as 28th Governor of South Australia, the first, and up to this point the only Aboriginal person to be appointed as a state Governor. One can only wonder what Governor Nicholls thought when he attended the Proclamation Day ceremony in 1976 and heard the 1836 promises of justice to Aboriginal people read aloud.

  The following year we attended the Proclamation Day ceremony again. Unlike the previous year, it was an unseasonably cool summer’s day. The weather was not the only thing that had changed. In the intervening twelve months, the Kaurna Heritage Committee and the Holdfast Bay City Council had negotiated to develop an inclusive ceremony. An Aboriginal ‘welcome to country’ performance began the formalities. When the Governor arrived, the official Aboriginal delegation presented him with a bunch of seven emu feathers, representing the seven ‘Rs’ of reconciliation: Recognition, Respect, Rights, Reform, Reciprocity, Responsibility and Reparations. Much of the ceremony that followed accorded with past formalities, but the atmosphere had changed from the previous year. Where the reading of the Proclamation promising justice to Aboriginal people had been redolent with irony, there was now a different air in its sentiments. Each non-Aboriginal speaker responded to the welcome to country with an acknowledgement of Kaurna land and culture. The formal ceremony closed with two Kaurna elders who rose and spoke of the ongoing importance of reconciliation. The last speaker referred to the Kaurna as the ‘original Stolen Generation’, and called for a Bill of Rights and a commemoration of the Letters Patent. As a gesture of reconciliation, the Governor, Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce, agreed to host such an event. On 19 February 2009, a ceremony to commemorate the 173rd anniversary of the Letters Patent, as a gesture of ‘reconciliation and healing’, was held in the grounds of Government House. At the event, various speakers addressed the State’s foundational undertakings to recognise Aboriginal legal rights and rights to land. The Governor spoke admiringly of the colony’s founding documents, and the ‘good intentions’ contained in them which, unfortunately, had not been fulfilled. ‘Accordingly’, he went on, ‘it is necessary for us now to renew the spirit of those good intentions, and define our resolve’.7

  The changing nature of Proclamation Day as an annual commemoration of foundation is an indication of how such occasions for public remembering can shift over time from affirming ‘shared values and meanings’ to become opportunities to explore complex histories in a changing political climate.8 It is still largely to be seen how such changes will translate into a broad transformation of public historical consciousness amongst settler-descended Australians about the terms on which colonial authority on Australia’s frontiers was secured, or the terms on which the pioneer legend was built. In anticipation of the next Proclamation Day ceremony, a local Aboriginal advocacy group sent out an advance call for protesters to attend, and to hold banners calling for a Treaty. These calls serve as a reminder of Janna Thompson’s point in Taking Responsibility for the Past that historical injustices ‘cast a long shadow,’ one that is not necessarily diminished by the passage of time.9 History, perhaps, is the present in constant and ongoing negotiation with the past.

  Notes

  Introduction

  Paul McHugh, Aboriginal Societies and the Common Law: A History of Sovereignty,
Status, and Self-Determination, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, p. 121–123.

  House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1837, 7, no. 425. Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements), p. 77.

  Ibid., p. 5.

  Ibid., p. 82.

  Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘“The Sin of the Settler” The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early nineteenth Century British White Settler Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4, no. 3 (2004).

  South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register (hereafter Register), 3 June 1837.

  Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child: A History of Law in Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995, pp. 5–10; Alex C. Castles, An Australian Legal History, Law Book Co., Sydney, 1982, pp. 151–519.

  Castles, pp. 520–1.

  Kercher, p. 5.

  Ibid.

  Cited in Castles, p. 524.

  John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1838, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2002, pp. 56–58.

  Connor, pp. 93–94.

  Tim Castle, ‘Watching them Hang: Capital Punishment and Public Support in Colonial NSW 1826–1836’, History Australia, 5, no. 2 (2008): pp. 43.3–43.8.

  Kercher, p. 10; Castles, p. 527.

  Kercher, p. 7.

  Castles, pp. 521–522.

  Susanne Davies, ‘Aborigines, Murder and the Criminal Law in Early Port Phillip 1841–1851’, Historical Studies, 22, no. 88 (1987): pp. 316–20.

  Ibid.

  Richard Broome, ‘The Statistics of Frontier Conflict,’ in Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, ed. Bain Attwood and S.G. Foster, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2003, p. 95.

  John MacGuire, ‘Judicial Violence and the “Civilizing Process”: Race and the Transition from Public to Private Executions in Colonial Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 29, no. 111 (1998): pp. 196–7.

  Cited in Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2008, p. 51.

  Kercher, p. 5.

  Proclamation of Lieutenant-Governor Stirling, 18 June 1839, in J.M. Bennett and Alex C. Castles, A Sourcebook of Australian Legal History, Law Book Co, Sydney, 1979, p. 257.

  Ann Hunter, ‘The Boundaries of Colonial Criminal Law in Relation to Inter-Aboriginal Conflict in Western Australia in the 1830s-1840s’, Australian Journal of Legal History, 8 (2004): pp. 221–222.

  Chris Owen, ‘“The Police Appear to be a Useless Lot up There”: Law and Order in the East Kimberley 1884–1905’, Aboriginal History, 27 (2003): pp. 109–127.

  Kercher, p. 62.

  Kercher, pp. 60–62.

  The only monograph-length survey of frontier conflict in South Australia is Alan Pope’s Resistance and Retaliation, but this was published over twenty years ago and examines only the first decade of settlement. Alan Pope, Resistance and Retaliation, Heritage Action, Adelaide, 1989.

  See for instance David Neal, The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1991; Mark Finnane, Police and Government: Histories of Policing in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994; Chris Cunneen, Conflict, Politics and Crime, Allen & Unwin, Kensington, 2001.

  GRG 5/2/1863/306 encl. 1262, State Records of South Australia (hereafter SRSA).

  Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster, In the Name of the Law: William Willshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2007.

  Henry Reynolds, ‘Reviving Indigenous Sovereignty’, Macquarie Law Journal (2006) 2. Reynolds cites M.F. Lindey’s The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law (1928) that ‘the broad rule is that the possession of a power extends as far as, and no further, than its administrative machinery is in efficient exercise’.

  Julie Evans, ‘Colonialism and the Rule of Law: the case of South Australia’ in Barry S. Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall, eds., Crime and Empire 1840–1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context, Willan Publishing, Cullompton, 2005, p. 59.

  Tom Griffiths, ‘The Language of Conflict’ in B. Attwood and S. Foster, eds, Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2003, p. 139.

  See for instance Tony Roberts, Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900, University of Queensland Press, 2005.

  W.E.H. Stanner, After the Dreaming, ABC Book, Crows Nest, 1991 (first published in 1968), pp. 22–25.

  Tom Griffiths, ‘Past Silences: Aborigines and convicts in our history’, in Penny Russell and Richard White, eds, Pastiche I: Reflections on nineteenth-century Australia, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1994, pp. 7–26.

  Robert Foster, ‘“Don’t mention the war”: Frontier violence and the language of concealment’, History Australia, 6, no. 3 (2009), pp. 68.5–68.7.

  Griffiths, 1994, p. 8.

  Derek Whitelock, Adelaide 1835–1976: A History of Difference, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1977, p. 4.

  Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829–1857, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1957,pp. 3–28.

  Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. xviii.

  Chapter 1: Foundations

  Charles Sturt, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Smith, Elder and Co, London, 1833, vol. II, p. 111.

  Sturt, p. 126.

  Sturt, p. 105–108.

  Sturt, p. 163.

  Sturt, p. 166.

  Sturt, p. 167.

  Sturt, p. 124.

  Sturt, p. 126.

  Sturt, p. 246.

  J.M. Main, ‘The Foundation of South Australia’ in Dean Jaensch, ed., The Flinders History of South Australia: Political History, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1986, pp. 1–12.

  Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1967, p. 55.

  Main, pp. 6–9.

  Ibid.

  Cited in Main, p. 9.

  Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land, Penguin, Ringwood, 1992, pp. 97–103.

  George Arthur to Spring Rice, CO 280/55 27 January 1835, SRSA.

  Ibid.

  CO 13/3, SRSA.

  CO 13/3, SRSA.

  CO 13/4, SRSA.

  John Brown, unpublished diary, 17 December 1835, Nos. 36–27, SRSA, p. 75.

  CO 13/4/21, SRSA.

  House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1837, 7, no. 425. Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements), p. 77.

  R.H.W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1974, p. 104.

  Ibid.

  Neal, p. 17.

  Reece, p. 107–108.

  Ibid.

  Connor, pp. 56–58; 93–94.

  Reece, p. 22.

  Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements), p. 83.

  Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements), p. 84.

  Minute by James Stephen, 22 July 1839, CO 201/286, cited in A.G.L. Shaw, ‘British Policy towards the Australian Aborigines, 1830–1850’, Australian Historical Studies, 25, no. 99 (1992): p. 279.

  House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1836, 39, no. 426. First Annual Report of the Colonization Commissioners for South Australia, pp. 9–10.

  Chapter 2: British subjects or enemy aliens?

  Register, 3 June 1837.

  Ibid.

  Ibid.

  Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History 1400–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.

  Elbourne.

  See for instance Frances Thiele, ‘Superintendent La Trobe and the Amenability of Aboriginal People to British Law’, Provenance 8 (2009) and Damen Ward, ‘Constructing British Authority in Australasia: Charles Cooper and the Legal Status of Aborigines in the South Australian Supreme Court, c. 1840–60’, Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 34., no. 4 (2006).

  Brian Dickey and David Howell, eds., South Australia’s Foundation Documents, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1986, p. 75.

  First Annual Report of the Colonization Commissioners, p. 8.

  CO 13/7, SRSA.

  South Australian Government Gazette, 11 July 1839.

  Southern Australian, 5 June 1839.

  GRG 24/6/1838/103, SRSA.

  An Act to Amend an Act of the Fourth and Fifth Years of His Majesty, empowering His Majesty to erect South Australia into a British Province or Provinces, 31 July 1838 (1 & 2 Vic., c. 60).

  Colonization Commissioner’s Instructions to Resident Commissioner, GRG 48/1/1/1838, SRSA.

  Southern Australian, 28 July 1840.

  Ibid.

  Ibid.

  Register, 1 August 1840.

  G. Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, Raukkan Publishers, Adelaide, 1979, pp. 56–57.

  Register, 15 August 1840.

  Register, 19 September 1840.

  Ibid.

  Ibid.

  Register, 27 April 1839.

  Clyne, Colonial Blue: A History of the South Australian Police Force 1836–1916, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1987, p. 45.

  Clyne, pp. 30–31.

  Clyne, p. 32.

  Robert Clyne, ‘War with the Natives: From the Coorong to the Rufus, 1841’, Journal of the Historical Society of SA, 9 (1981): p. 92.

  Clyne, Colonial Blue, p. 41.

  Ibid.

  Clyne, Colonial Blue, p. 51.

  Clyne, Colonial Blue, p. 15.

  Register, 19 September 1840.

  Ibid.

  Ibid.

  Register, 3 October 1840.

  Ibid.

  Ibid.

  Southern Australian 6 November 1840; The Register 7 November 1840.